CAW Delegates Drink: the Magna Cool-Aid

by Barry Weisleder / January 2008

Following a four-hour debate, delegates to the Canadian Auto Workers Council voted in Toronto on December 7 to endorse the union's 'Framework of Fairness' Agreement with auto parts giant Magna. The company's voluntary union recognition deal sees the CAW abandon the right to strike and give up the election of local worker reps. in Magna plants in favour of a 'selection' process in which management has an equal say.

Despite vocal opposition from CAW locals at GM Oshawa, De Havilland aircraft in Toronto, the CAMI plant in Ingersoll, and the bus drivers' unit in Oakville, over 80 per cent of the council's 800 delegates approved the arrangement that could bring up to 18,000 parts workers into the union over the next ten years.

The CAW brass diligently played the guilt card ('why would you turn away Magna workers now opting to join under the 'Fairness' agreement?'), while stressing the need to bolster the union's thinning ranks in the auto sector. At the same time the union tops arrogantly dismissed the idea that precedents harmful to workers' democracy and union independence are being set. The poisonous brew was presented as a sweet elixir for a membership-starved movement.

Still, the CAW-Magna deal is scorned by most of the labour movement. The Ontario Federation of Labour, which represents over 700,000 affiliated workers, met in convention just eleven days earlier in the same city and voted unanimously to condemn the arrangement. (The CAW did not rejoin the OFL after it was temporarily suspended from the Canadian Labour Congress in 2000.)

In other developments, OFL delegates voted to demand the removal of all Canadian military forces from Afghanistan, and pledged to mount a serious campaign (details unspecified) to compel the Ontario Liberal government to remove legal obstacles to union organizing, to increase funding for public health and education, and to improve living conditions at nursing homes for the aged.